Anomaly
Originally posted on /x/ Greetings. I guess I should say upfront that I'm new here, so be patient with me, as I don't know all the rules or etiquette or whatnot. A friend of mine linked me to this board after I told him the story and showed him the materials I'm about to share with you. He thinks some of you will appreciate it, but to be honest, from where I'm sitting this site seems more like a haven for idiots than a serious "paranormal image board." Whatever. I'm motivated to share this stuff and need to do so anonymously, for reasons which will become clear. Technically, I'll be breaking the law, but if I understand how this place works, this thread will disappear in a day or so anyway. Here's the deal. I am a production editor at a small independent publisher in the U.S. I won't say which or where, so don't ask, as I'd like to keep my job. The pay isn't that great, but it's an easy gig, and I like the people I work with. A lot of what we publish are what you'd call coffee table books. The kind people flip through when they're bored, but almost nobody ever reads cover to cover. Bland pictorial histories of certain cities or states that sell well in regional gift shops. The occasional book of maps or a biography. A few museums outsource their gallery catalogs to us. That kind of thing. The work is boring, but it's steady and we get enough jobs and our books make enough money to stay afloat, which is a lot more than most small presses can say these days. Because we've been around a while, our name is somewhat known to history buffs and people who think they're an expert on such-and-such town in Nowhere, Idaho or some esoteric topic nobody really cares about. We get a lot of unsolicitied manuscripts from people that really shouldn't be writing books and unsolicited CDs full of photographs from people that shouldn't be taking pictures. Because we're small, and don't have a separate acquisitions editor position, the job of going through this "slush pile" gets passed around the office. Very rarely, somebody will find something worth pursuing and pitch it to the rest of us, but our Senior Editor/Publisher gets the final say. For the last nine months I've been working more or less nonstop on a book that everybody at the office was pretty excited about. Our copyeditor found it during his turn with the pile. An old guy I won't name had contacted us out of the blue and offered us the chance to publish his rare archival photo collection, provided we treat the subject matter with the respect and seriousness he felt it deserved. To use his term, and what was going to be the book's title, the photos were all "Anomalies." That is to say, they depicted something out of the ordinary or otherwise inexplicable, something that usually had an equally interesting story to go along with it. Most of them were from the first half of the 20th century. Like I said, it's not the kind of thing we normally publish, but the few samples the guy sent in with his pitch letter were pretty compelling, and once we had seen the rest of them, heard a few of the stories, and realized that none of these pictures were widely known, we knew we had something that would get people's attention. The format was going to be simple and classy, with a lot of white space and breathing room. Each photo would appear as a high quality print on the right hand page, followed by a blank left hand page, and then a couple paragraphs to caption each photo on the following right hand page. From the very beginning, the guy was a nightmare to work with and the job took forever because he refused to send in more than one document at a time. He would send me certified mail, I would get it, scan it, and mail it back certified, and only then would he send the next one. He seemed to think he had an extremely valuable collection and was hugely paranoid about losing it, so he only risked one item at a time. In the end we spent so much money on mailing costs that it would have been cheaper to fly me to where the old guy lived with a scanner and a laptop. We were maybe a third of the way through the production process when this fucking guy pulled the rug out from under us. Somebody had offered him a large sum of money for the photos, way more than we were offering for the book rights, on the condition that the book get shit canned and the photos stay out of the public eye. We demanded he come in for a face to face and tried to reason with him, and cater to his pride and desire for "scholarly acclaim," and for a few days it seemed like it had worked. But when he got back home, he flip-flopped again and started cursing out me and my Senior Editor on the phone, demanding we shelve the book. He hired a lawyer who came up with some B.S. to void his contract, and then he threatened us with a lawsuit that would bankrupt us if we went ahead with the project and lost. To add insult to injury, the law firm sent this annoying little IT guy to our office to make sure the materials were wiped from our computers. Because the vast majority of it existed on my machine, and I had spent literally months of my life on the project, I felt, and still feel the most violated and bitter about the whole thing. Somebody should benefit from all that work. Hence my reasons for coming here. Unfortunately, I don't have the high resolution scans I made of the photos, but I did keep working drafts of the original captions and fourteen medium res placeholder "thumbnails" that Quark created as I was laying out the original version of the book. Don't ask me why we're still using Quark. It's what we know and what we paid for a long time ago. I'm not supposed to, but I occasionally take home the working Quark files to tweak on my home machine. The full file, with the full-res images embedded, gets way too large and unwieldy to bring home with me—most of the time I'm just experimenting with fonts and layout options anyway, so I don't embed the images until the end. Anyway, after all this shit went down, I discovered that I had a "working file" on my home machine of what we had done so far, so I printed to .pdf, and then stripped the text and images from that .pdf file. You folks will be the beneficiaries of that. Just to be clear, I don't claim anything with regards to the veracity and provenance of these photos. I'm not here to convince you they're real. I'm just putting them out there because I think they deserve to be seen and not hidden in some rich prick's private collection. Photo 1/14 The Collinwood Fire This is the last known photo taken inside the Lake View School in Collinwood, Ohio before it was consumed by fire on March 4, 1908, killing 172 students, two teachers, and one rescuer. The fire started when a ceiling joist ignited from a nearby steam pipe. Flames blocked escape routes, leading to panic and a stampede that trapped a large number of victims in a stairwell, where they were cooked alive. Additional casualties were incurred when burning students jumped from second- and third-story windows. Everyone in this photo perished, except for Mr. Olson, seated at the far right in the back row. The spectral artifacts in the photo remained unexplained. Photo 2/14 Charlie Noonan’s Last Interview Charlie Noonan was an amateur folklorist who travelled throughout the South and Southwestern United States during the early years of the 20th century, collecting tall tales and stories of the supernatural. According to his wife, Ellie, Charlie was told a story one day by an Oklahoma farmer about a strange woman who lived alone on an isolated property in the panhandle. The farmer claimed the woman was not a woman at all, but something else, something that hid its true nature beneath a headscarf and was never seen without a large dog by its side. Noonan was apparently intrigued enough to try searching for the woman during one of his research road trips. He was never seen again. Ellie Noonan was later contacted by a Tulsa pawnbroker who remembered reading about her husband’s disappearance in the papers, after finding his name engraved on a camera sold to him by an itinerant. The pawnbroker returned the camera, and Mrs. Noonan had the film inside developed in the hopes of finding a clue as to his whereabouts. This was the only photo on the roll. Unfortunately, neither the location of the property, nor the name of the farmer who told him the story was recorded in Noonan’s notes. Photo 3/14 'The Death of John Ulsted ' This prophetically torn photograph depicts a regimental color guard of the Union Army, one month before they marched into battle at Antietam (September, 1862). The gentleman on the far right, named John Ulsted, had the right side of his face and right arm blown off by cannon fire at the start of those hostilities. It is unknown exactly when the damage to the photo occurred. Photo 4/14 'The Axeman of New Orleans ' Édouard Martel was an unsuccessful French photographer and inventor who travelled throughout the U.S. during the first two decades of the 20th century, trying to drum up interest and investors for a device that added timer and automatic exposure features to Kodak’s popular line of folding “Brownie” cameras. During his travels he took thousands of automated photos to test and refine his invention. Often he would wake up early, set up a hidden camera in an inconspicuous spot on the streets of whatever city he happened to be in, and then walk to a nearby café or bar, so that he could capture candid scenes of daily life to remember his travels by. The best of these photos were selected for Martel’s one and only gallery show, in Paris, 1924. Unfortunately, Martel died penniless and unknown in 1955, and it was left to his daughter Jeanne to sort through the boxes and boxes of photos he left behind, to see what should be kept and what could be discarded. During this process she came across this photo, taken in New Orleans on the morning of October 28, 1919, a few hours before Martel boarded a steamer ship and returned to France. It turns out that Martel hated motion blurs in his photographs, because he thought they would reflect badly on the speed and accuracy of his lens mechanism. This prejudice made him cast aside and overlook what was probably the most important photo he ever took. What makes this photo so special? The night before it was taken, the notorious and still unidentified serial killer known only as “The Axeman of New Orleans” had committed his last murder, hacking Mike Pepitone to death in his bedroom and then fleeing the scene just as Pepitone’s wife was discovering the body. Could this be him returning to his residence? It’s impossible to say, but if it is, the image appears to belie the legend (based on the shaky testimony of Pauline and Mary Bruno, and prevailing prejudice of the time) that only a black man was capable of such savagery. Photo 5/14 'The Grand Caverns Cryptids ' This photo was taken in 1895 by an amateur spelunker/photographer named Oren Jeffries while exploring an unmapped section of Grand Caverns, in Southwestern Virginia. At the time it was taken, Jeffries was conducting photographic experiments, using super long exposures to see if anything at all could be captured in the total absence of light, otherwise known as “cave darkness.” He would situate himself on level ground, extinguish his lantern, and then open the lens of his homemade box camera for as long as he could stand the darkness. During one of these experiments, he heard something approach from the deeper recesses of the cave. Frightened, Jeffries abandoned his experiment and set off one of the Blitzlicht flashes he used for taking traditional photos underground. According to the report he later gave to a local newspaper, Jeffries saw three “humanoid” creatures staring at him from the shadows and took off running in the other direction and didn’t stop running until he was topside. Several days later, he returned with three other men to retrieve his box camera. This is the image that was recorded on the film inside. Photo 6/14 'The Harlow Twins ' 1938, Evergreen Park, IL (outside Chicago). Billy and Stevie Harlow were riding in the front seat with their mother Tammie when their Ford sedan collided head on with a Chrysler. During the collision, the cars spun in such as a way as to impact two additional vehicles. Tammie Harlow survived but the boys were ejected through the windshield and killed instantly. A crime scene photographer from the local paper took this shot as a crew of volunteers worked frantically to free John Downing, the driver of the Chrysler. It appears that little Billy and Stevie stuck around to watch. Photo 7/14 'The Sorrenson Tragedy ' The Sorrensons were a Danish family who immigrated to the United States sometime between 1905 and 1906. They arrived with their eldest child, Anders (seen on the donkey), and settled on a farmstead in Missouri. Three more children—Simone, Frikke, and Mathilde (center, right, and in the wagon, respectively)—soon followed. This photo, taken in 1916, captures all four of the children a few weeks before the tragedy. The three eldest kids were apparently playing fort in the hay barn and must have fallen asleep. Their father, Niclas, drove a wooden haysweep into the pile and dismembered all three, in locations accurately suggested by the flaw in the photo. Mathilde, the youngest, was inside the house with her mother at the time and not hurt. According to the son of a neighbor later interviewed by the author, the donkey later died in equally hideous fashion by getting its head caught in a barbwire fence and nearly decapitating itself in the frenzy to get free. This final detail could not be corroborated. Photo 8/14 Category:Disappearences Category:Mental Illness Category:History Category:Places Category:Ghosts Category:Reality